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How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Book Reviewed by:
Chapter One
The Discovery of What It Means
to Be a Black Boy
It was wintertime, early in the morning. I was in the third grade,
standing on the rectangular asphalt playground behind Holy
Trinity Interparochial School in Westfield, New Jersey, palming a
tennis ball, waiting. Ned, nearsighted and infamous for licking the
dusty soles of his penny loafers in the back of social studies class,
was splayed against the cold orange brick wall of the school building.
He had his head down and hands up, legs akimbo with his butt
out, like a South American mule bracing herself to be searched
by border patrol. “Not so hard!” he cried, glancing back over his
shoulder through smudged Coke-bottle lenses.
“Put your head down!” another boy yelled.
“Fine, just do it and get it over with, then,” Ned muttered.
“Head down!” the boy said. I wound my arm back and let fly a
fastball that seemed to hang in the air for a second before ricocheting from the small of Ned’s back like a Pete Sampras ace off some hapless ball boy at Wimbledon. Ned jerked upright and howled in pain. All my classmates screamed and high-fived me as
the bell rang and we rushed to grab our book bags and line up in
size order before our teachers came to lead us indoors. I was still
the undisputed king of Butts-Up, I thought to myself as I pulled my
Chicago Bulls Starter jacket over my uniform. Standing in line, waiting
for the younger grades to file past, I began mumbling to myself
bits of a song by Public Enemy, a song that my older brother had
been playing at home and that had gotten stuck in my head that
week like the times tables or the Holy Rosary. “Yo, nigga, yoooooo,
nigga, yoooo-oooooo, niiiigga . . .” I repeated the refrain over and
over under my breath, unthinkingly, as I relived in my mind’s eye
the glorious coup de grace, the deathblow I’d just dealt Ned from
over ten yards away—Blaow!
“But you’re a nigger, too,” a voice said from behind me, and I half
made out what I’d just heard, but not fully. I went on singing my
song, which I couldn’t claim to understand on any level, but which
somehow made me feel cool as hell, and that was all that mattered.
The voice repeated itself, louder this time: “But you’re a nigger,
too, Thomas, aren’t you?”
“Huh?” I said, pivoting to see Craig standing there, his dirtyblond
hair cut by his mother’s Flowbee into the shape of an upsidedown
serving bowl, like a medieval friar without the bald spot.
“What did you just say?”
“You’re a nigger, too, right, so how can you say that?”
“How can I say what?”
“‘Yo, nigga, yo, nigga’; how can you say that when you’re a nigger,
too, right?”
My mother is white, my father black. They met in San Diego in the
late 1960s. Both were entrenched on the West Coast front of what
at the time was called the War on Poverty. After San Diego, they
went up to Los Angeles. From L.A. they made their way north and
my father pursued doctoral studies in sociology at the University
of Oregon. In 1975, and over my maternal grandfather’s dead body,
they were married in Eugene at the county courthouse. They had
little money, fewer blessings, and plenty of love. Later, they moved
again to Spokane and my mother, Kathleen, gave birth to their first
child, Clarence, named for my father. From Spokane the family continually
moved east: first to Denver, then to Albany, then to Philadelphia,
and finally to New Jersey, where I was born in 1981.
When I was one year old, my father switched professions and
the family moved again, this time from Newark, where he had been
running antipoverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese and
my mother had been raising my brother and me, to Fanwood, a
small suburb thirty minutes to the west on U.S. Route 22. Fanwood,
like the space inside a horseshoe, is bordered on three sides by the
much larger township of Scotch Plains, and these two municipalities
by and large function as one. They share a train station and
public school system and together act as a kind of buffer ground
between wealthy Westfield to the east and poor Plainfield to the
west. Riots and waves of white flight long ago left Plainfield a
vexed cross between a legitimate inner-city ghetto—with all the
requisite crime, poverty, and hopelessness that go with that—and
an emergent middle-class suburb that in many ways resembles
Westfield, except for the condition of the houses and the color of
the residents. No such white flight occurred in Fanwood, Scotch
Plains, or Westfield, although like so many small towns in New
Jersey, they had their designated black pockets.
Excerpted from Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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